This study focuses on family members of clients with Chronic Renal Insufficiency (CRI) in hemodialytic treatment, signaling the importance of their participation in care aiming toward an adaptation of a new reality in one’s life. The objective of this study is as follows: to understand the meaning attributed by significant family members to their participation in caring for the client with CRI in hemodialytic treatment. This investigation was developed using a qualitative research modeled after Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological approach, namely to increase understanding in interaction with the other as a process of facilitating an understanding of one’s experience that constitutes the newly constructed reality. The subjects of the research were ten family members noted significantly for their care by the clients of a hemodialytic center from the state of Espírito Santo (Br). The results allowed to identify the care activities developed by the family members. The phenomenological interview consisted of a central question: what do you have in mind when caring for a family member with CRI? The analysis of the responses pointed principally toward two categories: the well-being of the client and the well-being of the family member, or caretaker. Generally, this demonstrates that the care given to the client by the family member is intended to enhance the health care needs of both the client and the family member, or caretaker. These perspectives support the quality of care through the nurse’s action in planning health and nursing care for the client as well as for the client’s family member, allowing recognition of each as a subject of his or her professional action.RESUMO: Este estudo focaliza os familiares dos clientes com insuficiência renal crônica (IRC) em tratamento hemodialítico, sinalizando a importância de sua participação nos cuidados tendo em vista a adaptação a uma nova realidade de vida. Tem como objetivo: compreender o significado atribuído pelo familiar significativo à sua participação no cuidado ao cliente com IRC em tratamento hemodialítico. Constitui uma pesquisa qualitativa, utilizando a abordagem fenomenológica de Alfred Schutz como método, entendendo a interação com o outro um processo facilitador de compreender as experiências e vivências que constituem uma realidade construída. Os sujeitos da pesquisa foram dez familiares apontados pelos clientes de um centro de hemodiálise no Estado do Espírito Santo como significativos no cuidado. Os resultados permitiram identificar as atividades desenvolvidas pelos familiares como cuidado. A entrevista fenomenológica consistiu da questão central: o que você tem em vista ao cuidar do seu familiar com IRC? A análise dos depoimentos apontou para duas categorias Bem Estar do cliente e Bem Estar do familiar ou cuidador.. O típico da ação demonstra que os cuidados dispensados ao cliente pelo familiar visam a atender tanto as necessidades do cliente quanto daquele que cuida. Estas perspectivas subsidiam a ação do enfermeiro para buscar a qualidade da assistência, planejando ações direcionadas ao cuidado da clientela, inclusive seus familiares, reconhecendo a ambos como sujeitos de sua ação profissional.

How modern economics is a social rather than historical cultural science, how it can produce adequate accounts in scientific constructs about common-sense constructs, can relate objectivistic accounts to subjective interpretations, how it can be theoretical, and how it hypothesizes marginal utility is all expounded in relation to Schutz’s theory of science, especially what he calls “postulates.”

This text includes the interventions of Alfred Schutz at the 1955 Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, entitled “Aspects of Human Equality,” to which his paper, later published as “Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World,” had been submitted. In Schutz’s reactions to the comments of other conference participants, one can see his views on: the “secularization” of more theoretical philosophical and theological ideas, the need to distinguish levels of abstraction, the importance of self-reflection on one’s own viewpoint, and the significance of common sense. In the end, he recommends that theoreticians return to kindergartens and playgrounds to examine the equality practiced there.

Starting from the experience of the Other, phenomenology takes otherness as something which withdraws from my own experience and exceeds the limits of our common orders. Radical otherness is something extraordinary, arising in my own body, situated between us and striking us before we look for it. Psychiatry confronts us with a peculiar sort of pathological otherness which in ethnopsychiatry is doubled to an otherness of a higher degree. We encounter the anomalies of other orders as if we were dipping into the Other’s shadow. This brings up many questions. How is the pathic related to the pathological, the normal to the abnormal? How can psychiatry take account of the intercultural Other without sacrificing its otherness to universal points of view? How is the unconsciousness of our own culture connected with that of other cultures? To what extent does intercultural otherness affect our intracultural otherness? Is there an alternative to the extremes of fundamentalism and globalism, which tend either to repress otherness or to level it?

In this paper, I try to argue that what Schutz enterprises can be integrated into what Husserl calls phenomenological psychology. My interpretation is based on Schutz’s own remarks, which are though more or less dismissed by most of the interpreters of Schutz. Beginning with an articulation of the social theory of Schutz, I explore the meaning of phenomenological psychology in Husserl as next in order to point out that despite the disagreement with Husserl’s transcendental approach to intersubjectivity Schutz has a closer adherence to Husserl than commonly held.

The struggles that Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, Harold Garfinkel, and other social phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists have had with Edmund Husserl’s progenitive but inconsistent notion of intersubjectivity are summarized and assessed. In particular, an account of Schutz’s objections to intersubjective constitution is presented. The commonly pervading elements and major differences within this lineage of inquiry – a four generation-long lineage of teacher and student that commences with Husserl, runs through Schutz and Gurwitsch, then Garfinkel, and then the present author and his colleagues – are discussed, under the advisory (as suggested by Maurice Natanson) that what Husserl sought was more important than what he found.

At present, there is a widely shared doubt about theoretical or practical validity of “nation state” as a framework to grasp the reality of the social. This doubt legitimately boils down to a more fundamental question, within or without the realm of social science, that is, whether or not the current conceptualization of the social is caught in a sort of anachronism that blocks thinking and acting in terms of transforming reality. In this paper, I would like to delineate the situation not merely as a theoretical shortcoming of cotemporary social science but as a challenge: a call for reactivated social sensitivity. In an effort to meet this challenge, the socio-political significance of dialogue and human plurality as its critical element will be elaborated in search of cosmopolitan opening to the ways to think and act for the social in the making.

The main endeavor of this project is to elucidate the correlation of two basic phenomenological concepts (typification and Phantasia), thereby allowing for a new discussion concerning the foundation of the life-world. While typification has been particularly developed in the social phenomenology of A. Schutz, Phantasia remains in a rather Husserlian “domain,” with regard to its phenomenological implications. In considering a new perspective, however, their discussion lends itself to a new understanding of the process of constitution. Namely, it will surpass the so-called egological sphere, by incorporating new valences for the structures of the life-world. Even if Phantasia is to be understood in terms of a subjective zone “par excellence,” its correlation to the constant realization of typification will help to circumscribe how Phantasia can condition and contribute to the realization of the life-world on a larger scale.